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Wednesday, 27 July 2011

During the time of the South Sea Bubble, Britain's first great financial collapse, people would fall for anything. My favourite example which I recall from my school-days was a scheme to import jackasses from South America.

This was not necessary as all the jackasses needed were freely provided by the gullible. When Sir Isaac Newton was asked about it all the great scientist said he could not calculate the madness of people.

Nowadays nobody is taught history - one of the great criminal acts of recent governments - so I get the impression that as a result these speculative lunacies are repeated with greater frequency.

Thus it is only a decade or so since the last flood of dotcom follies, yet people are putting astronomical values on a thing like Groupon which has yet to make a penny, whilst the wily Mr. Murdoch lost S500 million on MySpace. At least he seems to have learned from it. He thinks Twitter is a bad investment.

On a smaller scale I am constantly amused by the dodgy schemes put out on the internet to beguile the gullible.

One that got a good laugh yesterday was "Guru Incubator Training" being offered by someone called J. P. Maroney, which rhymes rather fortuitously with Baloney. One has this vision of morons going into a vast hutch on a conveyor belt and coming with massive brains at the other end. Another I got a laugh from was an offer to "explode" my fan page from Robert Grant of Crowd Conversion. Is it dangerous? Will anyone be injured? Only in the region of the wallet in both cases.

More deserving of injury is whoever is on charge of what passes for marketing at Littlewood's, a big mail order catalogue. One of their dresses has been featured in Grazia, Britains top selling fashion'n'gossip magazine. Their sort of cheap tat rarely gets coverage like that. Was it given prominence on their web page as any competent person would have insisted? No way. You had to search for it. Clueless.

During the time of the South Sea Bubble, Britain's first great financial collapse, people would fall for anything. My favourite example which I recall from my school-days was a scheme to import jackasses from South America.

This was not necessary as all the jackasses needed were freely provided by the gullible. When Sir Isaac Newton was asked about it all the great scientist said he could not calculate the madness of people.

Nowadays nobody is taught history - one of the great criminal acts of recent governments - so I get the impression that as a result these speculative lunacies are repeated with greater frequency.

Thus it is only a decade or so since the last flood of dotcom follies, yet people are putting astronomical values on a thing like Groupon which has yet to make a penny, whilst the wily Mr. Murdoch lost S500 million on MySpace. At least he seems to have learned from it. He thinks Twitter is a bad investment.

On a smaller scale I am constantly amused by the dodgy schemes put out on the internet to beguile the gullible.

One that got a good laugh yesterday was "Guru Incubator Training" being offered by someone called J. P. Maroney, which rhymes rather fortuitously with Baloney. One has this vision of morons going into a vast hutch on a conveyor belt and coming with massive brains at the other end. Another I got a laugh from was an offer to "explode" my fan page from Robert Grant of Crowd Conversion. Is it dangerous? Will anyone be injured? Only in the region of the wallet in both cases.

More deserving of injury is whoever is on charge of what passes for marketing at Littlewood's, a big mail order catalogue. One of their dresses has been featured in Grazia, Britains top selling fashion'n'gossip magazine. Their sort of cheap tat rarely gets coverage like that. Was it given prominence on their web page as any competent person would have insisted? No way. You had to search for it. Clueless.

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Drayton Bird Marketing Articles

The man Bird and his sad story

The CIM named Drayton one of 50 people who shaped today’s marketing.
And David Ogilvy said he “knows more about direct marketing than anyone in the world.” But don't blame him for all the crap you get sent.
He published his first novel, “Some rats run faster” when 27. Hardly anyone read this brilliant work as it had virtually no plot. 4 more books followed: “Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing” – out in 17 languages; “Salesletters that sell” & “Marketing Insights and Outrages” and "Direct Marketing for Lawyers".
He's written over 1,000 columns, spoken in 50 countries and worked with many leading brands, incl. Amex, BA, Hargreaves Lansdown, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, P & G, IBM, Unilever and Visa.
In 1977, he and two partners set up Trenear-Harvey, Bird & Watson, sold in l985 to O&M. As Vice-Chairman and Creative Director, he helped O&M Direct become the world's largest DM agency network, and was elected to the worldwide Ogilvy Group board.
He now runs Drayton Bird Associates and has interests in 3 other firms. The ones he never visits do much better.
This blog shows what all that has done to his head.